AdExchanger deserves its own kind of sneer club and it isn't even the worst of them.

Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl:

A word about the dangers of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or "super-intelligent AI systems"), which have become the target of general public concerns in just the past two weeks. I remain convinced that AGI is achievable, that the road to AGI goes through causal inference, and that the dangers of AGI taking over and enslaving humanity are very real. At the same time, I also believe that causal inference may hold the key to controlling AGI systems to secure the survival of the human species.

I hope therefore, half jokingly, that The Book of Why will not be banned by draconian legislation currently brewing in DC. (Hurry to get a copy just in case.)

"Very Real" ??? :(

Makes me miss his old semnet flame wars over structural equations and (lack of) fit statistics. it was a more innocent time.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/automattics-interim-ceo-and-legal-chief-signed-reciprocal-severance-deals-during-mullenwegs-brief-ouster/

$15m for 33 hours. good old fashioned shit show, no bots required.

It's a listserv. dm me if you'd like me to ask Paul to add you.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-ai-freeze-doomers-trump-bannon-sanders.html

Naked Capitalism had a good recap post of the ongoing Coxon drama. A bit disappointed by the LLM fact checking. The Sankey diagram of funding is very slick, but also llm-generated (from my peek at the GitHub).

Unexpected sneer in the JSI Chart of the week:

Raising interest rates will only serve to further weaken an economy that is being constrained by high energy costs, and everything that flows off energy, which is just about everything. The Fed could raise its lending rate to 10% and that will do nothing to open the Strait and bring down oil. The facts aren't wrong in this matter - the diagnosis of the problem is.

This entire predicament is almost as implausible as a couple of insolvent AI companies threatening to wreck humanity, but then 'volunteering' to slow down development in order to save humanity, provided that the govt steps in and gives them a bailout, disguised as regulation. I wonder if there are any vintage 'Too big to fail' t-shirts floating around on ebay.

Fun times!!

University of California Regent Scott Galloway on the HF incident:

And I go back, as I do often, to my fraternity days. I was inter-fraternity council president, or as I like to call it, the king of the jarheads. and the neighbors got together and said, we are done with Rush Week and all the noise and said, all noise, music has to be off by midnight. And I met with the head of the UCPD, and I'm like, what do you want me to do? I can't control these guys. And they said, we have an idea. And they didn't tell me what it was.

The next night, they showed up to every fraternity that was playing music after midnight, and they said, who's the president? And they arrested the president, and that kid had to spend the night in jail. If you hold Sam Altman and Dario Amade and Satya Nadella responsible for what these bots do, guess what? They're going to figure out a way.

Or if read the other way, they have already achieved Artificial Fraternity Intelligence.

h/t Lawyer Ex Machina for the California legislature recap:

AI bills that California Gov. Gavin Newson has signed into law so far at the end of California’s legislative session include:

Adam’s Law: SB-1119, named after Adam Raine, regulates chatbot developers who offer their products to users under the age of 18

AI Safety bills: AB-1405 creates a registry of AI auditors and a set of standards “for their independence, transparency, and integrity”; SB-813 requires the state’s Government Operations Agency to develop a framework for evaluating the credentials and expertise of independent verification organizations that may assess AI models for various types of risks

Related: A bill that would regulate the use of AI tools by California attorneys and arbitrators, to address the tide of AI-generated errors included in court filings within and outside of California courts, is still awaiting a signature or veto from the Governor

=> https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/09/newsom-signs-ai-safety-bills-backed-by-anthropic-openai-01069928

The governor signed one bill from Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan that creates a registry and ethical rules for outside auditors — third-party groups that AI developers could hire to ensure their models comply with state AI laws.

The second bill, authored by former member of Congress and state Sen. Jerry McNerney, tasks the state with establishing criteria for and checking the credentials of so-called “Independent Verification Organizations” and their expertise in assessing the risks posed by AI systems.

Note that the bill that actually required companies get outside audits got vetoed, so. Those clowns in congress did it again.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism

Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z.

More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively.

? the kids are alright ?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_saw-a-guy-watering-his-lawn-this-morning-share-7469886051847766016-rhHD/

Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.

Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.

And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.

I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.

We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.

Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.

Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.

NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer

For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like "write this app" or "write this functionality" which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.

Please, just fucking don't, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don't actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/rentahuman-musk-ai h/t naked capitalism

Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease out their bodies to autonomous AI agents.

gah

Last week, Wired writer Reece Rogers offered his body up to the platform, finding that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.

lmao of course they were